


Mad World

by snagov



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, First Kiss, Implied/Referenced Past Self-Harm, Love Confessions, M/M, Melancholy, Past Mental Health Issues, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-04-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23889733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: In a cabin at the edge of the world, Jon notices his scars line up perfectly with Martin's freckles.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 40
Kudos: 251





	Mad World

**Author's Note:**

> Set somewhere between S4 and S5. Liberal abuse of the song Mad World by Tears for Fears happens here.

It's so quiet.

He sits at the edge of the bed for a long while. The floor is cold beneath his bare feet. His shirt is grey and thin, much like his face. Grey troubles his dark hair. He wipes the sleep from her eyes and from his mouth. He’s slow to do his few ablutions. He brushes his teeth and doesn't bother to wash his hair. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters. Time moves differently here, tucked away from the world. In the kitchen, he brews a cup of Earl Grey and blows on it, staring at the prone figure on the sofa in the living room. Jon shifts uneasily, never looking away from the other man. 

The cabin walls them in. The isolation is at once both terrifying and a relief. Jon looks out the window. It's raining. The drops stick to the glass of the windowpane. Sometimes, if he's not careful, the raindrops look like pale featureless faces, all looking in.

_Am I alive? Is this - is this reality? It's hard to tell. I don't know. I don't know anymore. This isn't what I expected from death. From The End. I must be alive then._

_What's out there?_

This paused life is a strange existence. They sleep and play chess. Martin takes his bishop and brews cups of strong tea. Sometimes, if he's not careful, it feels like a happy life they could have lived together, with open arms and a warm bed. He swallows. The vision sticks like a pill in the throat.

Jon has always been careful in his nervous bones and the past few years have only exacerbated the tendency. Where he was once a rash teenager, he's now overcautious. Overanxious. He has three black shirts in his closet, all with high collars. He has four pairs of black jeans. Nothing else. Who needs anything else when you've got hot water and a ceramic sink, when you've got a bottle of Woolite to wash the stains out? He comes from nothing. From parents who bought the cheapest cans of soup. From a grandmother who ate little, always pushing the extra onto his plate. Poverty makes a miser of him, so he saves his coins and darns his socks himself. Scrub the skin hard, take the top layer off. Try to get the grime out, the blood out. Scrub off the smell of cheap detergent and secondhand wool. 

We never wash our childhoods off completely.

He flicks the curtain back, watching the clouds in their strange patterns. When you have nowhere to be, time seems to lose meaning. The clouds come over the water, black on black. A storm licks at the wretched cabin, promising thunder and sheeting rain. He looks doubtfully at the windows and peeling paint. He is from Bournemouth, far out on the coast. Jon knows the first rule of living on the water: when a storm puts its name in the hat, you board everything up and take cover. 

Instead, he continues to hold his teacup long after it has grown cold. The night is black and complete. Nights don’t tell their secrets as easily as day, we’re not so familiar with watching the stars cross the sky and telling time by moonlit shadows. He can’t tell if it’s nine o’clock in the evening or three in the morning, save for his little watch. He fiddles with the catch. Gold. Too heavy for his narrow wrists. It had been his father’s. Jon hates gold. But it doesn't matter. it's never mattered. Thunder rolls in his stomach. A storm outside, a storm in a teacup, a storm in his gaunt belly. 

“Hey,” Martin says. He looks almost young again when he yawns. Almost. No amount of illusion can erase the ill pallor of his skin or the spiderwebs of tired lines that map his face. Jon knows his face looks the same. All around them, the same worn-out faces.

“Martin,” Jon says. “What are you doing?”

“I’m making you breakfast.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not. And you’ll be better with something to eat.”

“You don’t have to fuss over me.”

“Someone needs to.” Martin looks up, his finger running along the edge of his cup. Jon swallows and says nothing. He looks away, his teeth as sharp as a fork and knife in his mouth. 

The quiet again. They breathe the same air for a while. Jon sighs and knows he will let Martin fuss. There is too much loneliness waiting for both of them. _What if you don’t like what you find?_ He wants to be better, to be likable. Jon had not been a likable child. He’d had a penchant for avoiding other children, trying to worm his way into adult conversations. When he didn’t want to talk, he didn’t say anything at all. There were no friends to bother him, so he turned the pages and kept the words company. He knows he’s quiet at all the wrong times now. He doesn’t know how to fix it and stares at his hands instead. His scars look like pencil wounds. Bits of broken graphite trapped and dark under the skin. In the night, they are not so dissimilar from moles. From freckles.

Martin turns to reach for a shirt. The light falls across him. Jon studies the nape of Martin’s neck. Freckles there too, laid out in a constellation against his skin. They’re hardly visible against the fading sunburn but Jon is careful. He quietly draws them on a piece of paper. Later, with a hand mirror angled in the bathroom, he studies the back of his own neck, hair swept up in a skinny hand.

The scars match. 

He had known they would.

He doesn’t mention them. 

_I’ve got to get out of here._ The cabin is making him sick. He wants out. To buy a ticket out. One way please, take me home. Home to seashores and alewives, to long boat slips and grey stone churches. Always there’s Bournemouth, calling him back again. The ocean, waiting. Water, water, take me home. How do these rooms fit together? He's navigated them before. But now rooms open upon rooms he does not recognize, rooms he remembers but weren’t they somewhere else? He wanders down the hall and falls into a bed. _I am backwards,_ he thinks to himself, holding his hands up to the ceiling and staring at them. _Backwards and inverted._ But his hands look the same, the spirals and whorls on his thumbpad are the same as before.

Hours pass. He sleeps.

* * *

Soulmate. It’s a strange concept, soulmate. _What if I tell you and you don’t love me like that? What if you love me for a while, what if we fall apart?_ He thinks about a world with separated lovers. A soulmate out in the streets and cafes, their love rotting out from within their chest. _What if I fuck it up? What if you stop loving me?_ There’s no hope after a lost soulmate. Everything else is a balm for the wound. 

He can’t risk it, so he says nothing. Instead, they make tea and watch shadows climb the walls. Jon leaves his mind to wonder. The Institute is vast. He eats the statements like manna, subsisting on sentences scraped into his plate. On bits of audio recordings like crumbs. Bearing witness to every dark and strange thing. Still, despite it all, Jon has not recorded even a quarter of the testaments. There are many he’s read and frowned over that don’t quite seem to fit the theme. Certainly supernatural, yes, but none of these outliers had seemed to represent an entity. None of them had seemed to, strangely enough, fit into any sort of fear at all. 

_Testament of Rita Gowan, who was pulled from a car crash to safety by a man who was never identified and appeared on no security cameras._

_Testament of Dorian Whittaker, who dreams of red threads crisscrossing the world, connecting lovers._

_Testament of Mircea Nicolescu, who had a mark on his inner forearm that perfectly matched that of his lover’s._

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth," he had whispered to himself.

Love has always seemed distant to him. He has seen it on television, read it in books, desperately chased it over the years. His grandmother had told him that God loved him and for a while, while he was young, Jon tried to love God back. It always rang hollow. He’s got a disbeliever's heart and has never been good at lying to himself.

Every fear can be marked down and categorized. Jon has made a career of learning terror. Every fear but one. What does it mean to prefer to be alone over rejection? Over risk? He hates his own quick heartbeat, the insidious terror that seeps from his pores. The names of the entities run through his mind like a rosary but none are quite right. He doesn’t know who to blame. 

_Don't push me away._ (The memory of a childhood. A birthday party. The balloons in red and blue. A cake. The empty tables too. _Why didn't you come? Why didn't anyone come?)_

* * *

Sometimes he feels like a fool. 

_Why am I so afraid?_

No, he doesn’t need to answer that. 

Martin reaches for his hand. Jon watches. He sees his hand kept in the other, the both of them down to skin and bone and blood. Keep an eye on the shadows, make sure they’re all accounted for. Make sure the scars are what you remember.

Scars. 

It’s strange to look in the mirror and to see your body but not your body. We develop a concept of ourselves. A conceit. There is a point when the march of progress ends and we are not always trying to be more beautiful, but to merely mitigate the damage. The scars cross his skin, his bitter heart. They pockmark his forearms and skinny neck too. He had almost looked attractive once, if in need of a good year’s sleep. Now, well, it’s different now. The hyperpigmented marks dot him and Jon knows that no one will find them beautiful. 

It's strange but when Jon looks at the rivers of scars chasing up his forearms, he finds that he likes them. They fit. As if they should have always been there.

Another memory, age sixteen. It had been February and snowing. The inpatient clinic had had windows in the main activity room. Jon had drawn endless circles going nowhere on a white sheet of printer paper. 

"You're lucky," a girl had said to him. They both wore pajamas and no shoelaces. "You won't even have any scars. No one will be able to tell."

Jon had said nothing. Beyond them were two locking double-doors, each with heavy glass interlaced with narrow crisscrossing wires. They waited there, the world left in constant motion outside. Someday the doors would unlock and he'd go back out into it, back into the daily races. Into a constant rush that had never made sense. You can't stay in here forever, so he'd eaten his meals at preordained times and watched _Casablanca_ on repeat. Group therapy met once a day, passing around papers to list their aspirations. _Photographer, journalist, historian._ Jon had put potato farmer, furious at no one in particular. _You can stay,_ the hospital ward had seemed to say. _You'd be safe here. Everything else will keep going, it won't get in here. It won't get to you. You can be safe._

Now, years later, he rubs the exhaustion out from between his eyes. The cabin is as safe as a coffin around them and just as wrong.

* * *

“Why are you here?" _Why do you stay?_

“Because I want to, Jon. You need - look, you need someone. Some support. And I - "

Martin doesn't finish the sentence but the words take shape in the air, as good as printed. _And I love you._ Jon's eyes are hot. His shoulders sharp and stiff. He wants to reach for Martin but the distance between them feels like six feet of earth. Jon closes his eyes and feels the other man’s heart beating in his own chest. How long have they been here? Too long. Even Jonah had only given three days to the whale. Outside, the world is going mad.

“Do you ever think about running away?” Martin asks. His voice is soft.

“Yes.”

“Me too. The woods, a river. Somewhere out under the stars.”

“None of this.”

“Right.”

Jon sighs. “But there’s nowhere to go, is there? This -“ he spreads his hands, “This is everywhere.”

“Well, we’ll just have to focus on after.”

“Martin -“

“On _after,_ Jon.”

Jon nods, tucking the hope in his pocket. 

“Is this okay?” Martin asks, locking their fingers together. The television casts the room in blue light.

“Yes.”

And it is. It’s Martin, so it’s okay. Martin never pushes. Martin always makes sure to have a heavy footfall, to announce his presence. Jon generally slinks away from touch like a suspicious cat but Martin is quiet and warm on the sofa. The light is on, a graphic novel open in his lap. Jon finds himself moving closer, settling in on the cushion next to him. 

They watch a show to pass the time. At one point, Jon’s head finds a place on Martin’s shoulder. When he wakes, the show is over and Martin’s asleep with a throw blanket pulled over the both of them. 

There’s a hand in his and Jon looks again, starting at the freckles on the back of Martin’s hand as if asking for reassurance. Raising a hand, he spreads his own fingers out, the scars dotted across his own skin in an identical way. He wonders if Martin has noticed and doesn't know why he hasn't said anything yet. Not yet.

Why doesn’t he?

Perhaps it is the fear again. The itching, creeping paranoia. Fear is insidious. He was born to it. To a mother who would never stand in front of a microwave. To a father who kept maps marked with nuclear fallout shelters. Neither of them had stayed with him long. Jon is afraid of putting his hand out, having it slapped away. _Yes, you might love me now but what about tomorrow. What about later, when you know me better? When you know more about me? Will you still want me then?_

Every day, a new school. Every day, new faces. Every day, alone in a mad world. 

_Why are we doing this? I don't understand. I can't quite figure it out - Martin, why are you here? You could do better. You deserve better._ He wants to ask questions, to cast his querying mind out and form a hypothesis, test a theory. Find out why the two of them are like lightning in a bottle. But Jon has never gotten an answer he’s ever liked, so he doesn’t say anything.

His chest rises and falls as he breathes. The night wraps around them, hiding the details. Softening the sharp parts. The room is dark, his hair is dark, his clothes are dark, his future too. He’s as dark as a border. A line drawn in India ink and just as liminal. What kind of life is this? It isn’t one. Where have you gone, Jon? Who are you, Archivist? Are you the same?

The edges of his humanity float up like answers in a magic eight-ball. Memories rise.

His mother had kept a little herb garden. A series of pots on the back steps, all in terracotta. The soil had been black and he had dug his chubby child hands in, clutching the roots of basil and rosemary. "No, Jon," his mother had said, "Here, we'll bury them again. They have to be buried so they'll grow." 

Bury it down, let it grow. 

Sometimes he hears the bells of the nearby parish church. He doesn’t go. His father might have been a C-of-E type but his grandmother had taken Jon to St. Dunstan’s every Sunday for prayer and penance. He doesn’t _believe_ , not in God of all things, but religion sticks to him like a bad smell. The look of the Byzantine edifice of the church never leaves him. The red brick and terra-cotta. The stained glass of the windows. The hush of the apse, the sound of the heavy wooden doors closing behind him. 

No, Jon doesn’t believe in God, but sometimes while lying in bed in the dark, he wishes he still had the little gold and silver crucifix pendant from his childhood. It had used to cut into his palms when he would hold it tightly, the metal worn down by years of fear. His grandmother would light votive candles and place them before her icon of Saint George, praying for protection and mild weather. Now, in the quiet room with the too-long shadows, he wishes there were a few candles to light. 

He remembers the ceiling fresco, done in sky blue and centered around the red eye of God. The Eye of Providence. Give a prayer up, ask for a blessing. The priest had quoted from Psalms 33:18. "Behold, the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear Him, on those who hope in His mercy."

"Does God ever look away?" Jon had asked, seven years old. 

"No," the priest had said. "He is always watching and always with you."

Jon doesn't believe in God anymore but he knows he is always being watched.

* * *

Martin stirs. The blanket slips from them to the floor.

"Hey," Martin says, blinking the sleep away. His hair is copper in the faint light. His skin is warm beneath the t-shirt. 

"Hey," Jon murmurs, smiling before he can catch himself. What does love look like? The stories all go the same, the falling in and falling out. The over and over and happily ever afters too. 

“It’s the end of the world,” Jon says. 

“Yeah. It sure feels like it.”

“If we don’t make it through -“

Martin squeezes his hand, holding onto him like a bit of hope. Jon stares at their knitted fingers. His grandmother had once told him that hope could be kept. She’d tucked a little red wax almadel into his pocket, inscribed with the names of the angels and the saints. He doesn’t know where it is now, his pockets lined with only lint. Not even two coins to rub together for good luck. 

The marks stand out dark against his skin. What if this went sideways? Would they disappear? Fade away like the tan around a wedding ring, eventually coming back to the blank beginning? Would they hang around? He’d carry them into every future relationship. When he touched someone he loved, reached for their hand or heart, would he still see the scars and remember how it had gone wrong? That there had been a deeper love. A fated love? And he’d ruined it? 

Sometimes he washes blood from his shirt. Digs it out from beneath his nails. It’s not always his. 

They haven’t kissed. It seems so strange sometimes. In between the _sleep wells_ and the _good mornings,_ Jon knows that most would kiss. Most would stumble to the bed, pulling shirts over each other’s heads and reaching for belt buckles. But they’re different. He doesn’t know what to call them. Are they dating? Lovers? Friends? It’s hard to quantify. He’s afraid to break the equilibrium. A kiss feels like a door and they’re safe here, in this cabin. He doesn’t want to break the glass.

Eventually, even safety will choke you out too.

 _Where will we go from here? I’m not good at this. I don’t have anything to offer you. You’d be better off not getting involved. Maybe you don’t even want to be involved. Maybe it doesn’t matter, this is all in my head._ His fingers twitch. He wants to reach for Martin’s hand. To cover the wide knuckles with his own, to feel the soft copper hair. But he doesn’t, sick on his own fear. What fear is this? He cannot name it. If he could only name the entity, categorize it, label it. Record it and stick it on a shelf. 

_Don’t push me away. I’ll push you away first. Leave me alone._

“Do you think fear is the most powerful?” Martin asks. 

“What do you mean?”

“Well, these - the entities. They’re our fears - well, our fears brought into the world.”

“Right."

“What about other -“ _What about love?_

"I don't know, Martin," Jon sighs. 

Martin nods and taps his fingers against his knee. “What happens after?"

"After?"

"You know what I mean, Jon. What happens after this?" Martin swallows. Jon can see the nervousness in the tremor of his jaw, the sheen of faint sweat on his forehead. "To you and me."

Memories of a birthday party. Empty chairs. Jon shifts on the sofa. "I don't know. Back to normal, I suppose. For whatever measure of normal we can manage."

“Can I still see you?"

Jon stares. His eyes are wide, his legs shake. He tries to stay very still. "Do you - " He swallows, his dark hair scatters over his face, never listening to reason nor hairspray."Do you want to?"

“I like you.”

 _Why?_ "Oh."

"Actually," Martin says, his hands fidgeting. "I love you, you know." He looks up and his eyes are warm and green as lichen. Jon falls in, falls forward, coaxed toward the vastness offered before him. This is a different sky. Let go, fall in, dive deep. Martin smiles and the cabin feels bright. There is a group of three small freckles under his left eye. Jon wants to reach for them, to know if they're as warm under his touch as the three small scars are under his own eye. 

His lungs can't keep up, he breathes fast and shallow. Jon's hands move without asking, reaching up toward Martin's face. His soft jaw, his red beard. His straight nose, bushy eyebrows. His eyelashes are light and red too. His cheeks are flushed and the heat gathers in Jon's cupped palm. He brushes a fingertip across the freckles. Warm. Slightly raised. Just like his.

He had known they would be. 

"What is it?" Martin asks, shivering under his careful touch. Jon stares at his lips. His parted mouth. The answer is simple, everyone has seen it but him. It is horrifying, embarrassing. Blood rushes to his face, to his neck, his shoulders. It flushes his cheekbones, creates unappealing splotches on his neck. His eyes widen and swallow up the other man.

_I love you._

He is not sure if he is the one making that harsh breathing noise. He wants to check his pulse, it feels out-of-control. He cannot without drawing attention. _Why are you looking at me like that?_ Martin moves imperceptibly closer. They trade body heat, barely inches apart. He can see the gentle lines around the other man’s eyes, the curve of his shoulders just under the cotton shirt, the slight bead of sweat across his forehead.

“Martin - “

“You don't have to - you know, if you don't want,” Martin says, quiet and cautious. “It's okay. It is. Whenever you're - you know. Ready. If you are.” 

Jon is no fool, except for now, a complete fool, drowning and out of his depth. He wants to run, he wants to break. He _aches_ and cannot say why. He is horribly sure he knows why. It is loud inside of him, raging. He needs to be quiet, he needs a drink, a shower, needs to _talk._ Needs to soften the horrible ringing silence.

He will never know what came first. Martin moves to him, those beautiful hands coming up into his shirt, fisting as if to clutch furiously and keep Jon still in the madness. His mouth presses to Jon’s, firm and so completely _certain,_ as if this were as simple as breathing. As if this were the most obvious thing in the world. Jon opens up beneath Martin's kiss, this touch of something so bright and beautiful. _I need you._ His hands come up to either side of Martin's face, cupping the square jaw, tucking into the curls of his beard.

"I love you," Jon murmurs. 

Martin's eyes go wide. He kisses Jon again. Martin's hands run through Jon's black hair and scrape across the stubble of his jaw. His index finger rests on a pockmarked scar on the side of Jon's throat and Martin watches his finger rub gently over the raised surface. Jon stares at a matching mole on Martin's own neck. 

"I don't think it's just fear," Martin whispers. "That causes _things._ Supernatural things. I've been thinking about it."

"Yeah," Jon breathes. 

"I'll go with you anywhere, you know."

"It's dangerous. I can’t lose you,” he says with a voice like a leather boot. 

"I know," Martin cups the side of his face, tipping their foreheads together. "I know it doesn't feel like it right now but we _will_ get through this. I won't leave you, Jon. Promise."

Jon nods. He says nothing, stilling his mind and thinking instead of quiet and dark things. The earth and stone beneath him. Where he is from, where he is going. Outside, the storm howls on. The ground is barren. It is soaked with snowmelt, yes, but it is that sort of earth that never drinks up water. We don’t talk about that, the difference between good black soil and barren dusty earth. You can only get good planting soil from dead organic matter, from decomposition. Death sustains life. The rain falls. Buried here, deep behind wooden cabinets and plaster walls, something takes root in the dark, urged on by this bit of warmth and light. 

He will give his own statement someday. On an antiquated recorder in a dusty room, bearing the marks of his own heart on his skin. It might go something like this: _Statement of Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of The Magnus Institute, regarding the appearance of and existence of soulmarks._

"I like your scars," Martin murmurs, kissing Jon's neck gently. Jon closes his eyes and leans into it. 

"Do you?"

Martin nods. "They suit you somehow. Like they should have always been there." He laughs a little, nervous and hesitant. "Is that weird? That's weird, isn't it?"

Jon shakes his head. "No, it's - it's not weird at all." _No, I've been waiting for you all this time. I kept a place at the table. I saved a piece of cake._ The long night has stretched on. Now the sun begins to stir the sky and Jon watches the sunrise shift along the walls. Even in these strange times, the dawn always comes and on an overstuffed sofa, Jon holds the light between his arms. 

It will be time to leave soon. Out then, from the whale into the light, neither one alone.

  
  
  



End file.
